Basketball is a game that cannot be coached. It can only beplayed. -- Dr. James Naismith

AS THE GAME'S INVENTOR, DOC NAIsmith could be presumed to know.It's perfect, then, that Naismith's spiritual grandchild -- a man whoplayed for Phog Allen, who in turn had learned basketball fromNaismith himself -- would spend the better part of his lifeapparently proving the Good Doctor so wrong. But then North Carolinabasketball coach Dean Smith has always been a compulsive contrarian.Conventional wisdom says you can't get through to young men nowadaysby asking them to forestall gratification or forgo personal glory.Smith asks just that, and we know from what Bourbon and Franklinstreets looked like on the morning of April 6 just how successful hewas.Smith might find in the 1993 championship banner only one nettle:that a sophomore, Donald Williams, rather than the team's indomitablesenior, George Lynch, was named the Final Four's most outstandingplayer. Ah, Donald needs to work on his passing and defense, you canhear Smith saying now, in that distinctive nasal twang. His role as ashooter is just a small part of the team. And you know what? AfterNorth Carolina's victory over Michigan in the title game, all thoseskeptical of Smith's relentlessly enunciated philosophy were ready toconcede him the point. His 1982 champions, with Michael Jordan, JamesWorthy and Sam Perkins, were more top-heavy with talent, but this wasSmith's deepest and most skillfully assembled team. This was the DeanTeam. ''It was put together in just the right way,'' says Wake Forestcoach Dave Odom. ''I've seen all of his teams, and this may be thebest job he has ever done as a coach.''The Tar Heels' foundation had come to Chapel Hill three autumnsago. Center Eric Montross, point guard Derrick Phelps, swingman BrianReese, power forward Clifford Rozier and forward Pat Sullivan arrivedwith ballyhoo that didn't abate until Michigan brought in its FabFive a year later. Smith considered the hype so overheated that toprove a point -- did we mention that he's a contrarian? -- he had thefreshmen play the rest of the squad in a 20-minute public scrimmagethat fall. ''The greatest recruiting class of all time'' lost by 46points. That's a 92-point loss, Smith was quick to point out, over afull game.The class of '94 -- one wag has called it the Pre-Fab Five --benefited from the perfect subtraction (the malcontent Roziertransferred to Louisville after one season) and the perfect addition(Williams and his crystalline jump shot arrived as Rozier left). Theperfect senior (Lynch) stood fast. Like spackling compound, a savvypasser (Henrik Rodl) and a mobile shot blocker (Kevin Salvadori)filled cracks and provided cohesion.Smith would never admit it, for he flatly refuses to compare hismany teams, but no previous squad had so completely bought into whathe teaches. For eons the Tar Heels have had a system of ''tiredsignals,'' by which players take themselves out of and put themselvesback into the game. Smith abolished the system several years agowhen, upon studying film, he and his staff noticed that some players,clearly fatigued, refused to signal the bench. This year's team hetrusted to be honest with him and, more important, with each other.So he restored the tired signals. ''It's as if Coach Smith said,O.K., I can see you guys get it, you understand what the Carolina wayis about,'' says Phelps.Smith invited his players to share what they thought on othermatters, too. Some of their suggestions had to do with the welter ofminutiae he keeps tabs on. Managers, for instance, had always kepttrack of layups missed in pregame warmups, so slackers could beassessed extra running. When his seniors approached him during theoff-season to ask that this particular practice be abolished, Smithagreed. But he also gave in on more substantive things. After thethree-point shot was introduced in 1986, certain Tar Heel shootershad a ''green light'' to take threes; those with less deft toucheshad a ''yellow light,'' meaning they could shoot only under certaincircumstances; and a few players lived in Deano's ''red light''district. '' 'Red light, green light' was making me more hesitant,''says Reese. ''This year there was no light, and the team was morecomfortable with its shots. Coach Smith knew that a team of juniorsand seniors wasn't going to try anything wild.''As Smith began granting them more license, the players keptreciprocating, showing an ever keener sense of obligation. Smithcould be more malleable because they allowed him to be. The realtest came in February when with the Tar Heels sputtering at theoffensive end, Smith wrote out for each player precisely how hethought each could best help the team. But before giving theplayers their mission statements, the coach asked them to state whatthey considered their individual roles to be. Lynch said he had torebound and score close to the basket. Montross said he needed toperfect two basic moves and maintain an I-shall-not-be-movedattitude. It was uncanny how perfectly Smith's goals for the playersand their goals for themselves coincided. Everyone was on the samepage.The word system has always caused Smith to recoil. He believes itto conjure up images of football teams that run, say, the split T andthus must scour the land for a split-T quarterback every few years.''To me it connotes that we're rigid, that we don't change with ourpersonnel, and that's just not true,'' he says. ''Now, if you say'North Carolina philosophy,' I love that. We change every year, eventhough the basics remain the same.''How many thousands of people, unfamiliar with the Carolina way,watched the final minute of the championship game and, seeing Smithplatooning Montross and Salvadori on offense and defense,respectively, were taken aback by what must have seemed to be notjust overcoaching, but lousy coaching? Why not leave Montross, withall his bulk, in on the defensive end to challenge the Wolverines'muscular Chris Webber? The point is, it isn't enough to define forSalvadori a role as a defender and then refuse to allow him toperform that role in the most decisive moments. By leaving Salvadoriin, Smith expresses so much confidence in him that whatever taskSalvadori is asked to perform is likely to become self-fulfilling.The Carolina system has its roots almost precisely 1,000 mileswest of Chapel Hill, in eastern Kansas. Born in Emporia and raised inTopeka, Dean Edwards Smith is the only son of strict Baptistschoolteachers. In high school he played baseball, football andbasketball, and he always seemed to hold down the coachly positions-- catcher, quarterback, point guard. He went to the University ofKansas on an academic scholarship, majoring in math, but wasnevertheless an athlete, a reserve on the Jayhawks' 1952 NCAAchampions. In '58, after five years in the Air Force, he joined FrankMcGuire's staff at North Carolina and, three years later, at age 30,was named head coach.The circumstances of his hiring hardly foreshadowed the success tocome. The Tar Heels had just served a probation for recruitingviolations. Chancellor William Aycock, the story goes, chose Smithbecause he believed the young coach would flounder around, and asport sorely in need of scaling back would be deemphasized bydefault. ''Whoever heard of anybody named Dean?'' wondered McGuire inhis New York manner when he first met Smith. ''Where I come from youbecome a dean. You're not named Dean.''If the name signified a sort of premature maturity, Smith had todraw on all of that precociousness as he struggled through his firstfew seasons. Returning home after a loss at Wake Forest in 1965, theteam bus pulled up in front of the gym to find the coach hanged ineffigy. In the decisive months after that incident, before a recruitfrom Pennsylvania named Larry Miller provided the cornerstone ofSmith's first Final Four team, in 1967, the coach found solace in abook called Beyond Our Selves, by Catherine Marshall, which was sentto him by his sister, Joan. One chapter, ''The Power ofHelplessness,'' allowed Smith to turn a trick of paradox: Anindividual could plumb his own depths for strength, even at the mostabysmal moments, so long as he recognized that there were limits towhat that strength alone could accomplish.That lesson can be seen in Carolina's almost pathologicalexaltation of the team over the individual. It is also evident inSmith's self-effacement, which he practices so scrupulously that itcalls attention to itself. He's fastidious about remembering not onlypeople's names but also the details that go with them, and he usesthose recollections as a shield to deflect any attention that mighthunt him down. In New Orleans, Smith was feted, along with the otherFinal Four coaches, at a huge NCAA gala during which he was obligedto speak under conditions -- at the center of a cavernous hall, withno podium to hide behind, literally in the spotlight -- that made hisdiscomfort palpable. Sure enough, Smith was soon pointing out someoneat a back table, a woman who had asked him for an autograph earlierin the evening, a Margaret from Arkansas.There also abides in Smith much of the activist spirit of a manwho once helped integrate lunch counters and campaigned for a nuclearfreeze -- the stuff of someone who, like John Stuart Mill, believesthat society is perfectible. Smith the coach takes after Smith thepublic man, and thus his teams are the product of constantrefinement. This season the legend of his obsession with detail grew:At halftime of a game against Georgia Tech, Smith chided a courtsidestatistician about a two-rebound discrepancy between the officialcount and a larger, presumably more accurate figure kept by one ofhis managers on the bench. And when Williams nearly missed the busover to the Superdome for the NCAA semifinal game against Kansas,Smith told him, ''You had eight more seconds, Donald.'' The sophomorewould have likely missed his start in the game had he hopped aboardmoments later than he did.But there is also a part of Smith that repudiates secularism andholds fast to the lessons of Beyond Our Selves. Rodl, the senior whoonce considered going to divinity school, suggests that theinterdependence Smith tries to instill in each team is well expressedin the epistles of St. Paul, which speak of the body's many parts.''You may not be equal in talent,'' Rodl says, ''but everybody isequal in the eyes of God, whether you're a good player or a badplayer.'' The coach is a sort of minister, vested with the duty toserve his ad hoc flock. He must see that the best players play most,of course, and remind players and press alike that differences intalent are matters more relevant to how we make our way in the world.But Smith must also see to it that three years of investment in ''howwe do things at North Carolina'' bring a young man closer to a stateof grace than three months do. That's why the senior walk-on adornsthe cover of the media guide while the hotshot freshman helps themanagers lug equipment.The Associated Press has never named Smith its Coach of the Year;that may be because the award is altogether too worldly for thestruggle Smith goes through. ''I suppose my first goal was to keep myjob,'' he said in New Orleans during a rare moment of publicintrospection. ''Then I wanted to win. Then I got more mature andsaid, 'Oh, we want to play well.' Then I'd ask myself, 'Why do I feelgood when we don't play well and win?' '' Who but collegebasketball's original philosopher king would even think to ask such aquestion of himself?It's amusing to think that some North Carolina Democratsunofficially approached Smith a few years back to see if he could becajoled into running against Republican Senator Jesse Helms, a manSmith finds more objectionable than a tardy freshman. It would neverhave worked. Smith has never uttered a sound bite in his life. Askhim a question and he might begin by challenging some element of thepremise of the query. Then he'll throw in some historical aside --usually only tangentially related to the issue at hand -- drawn from% his staggering memory for detail. If possible he'll find somepretext to praise a senior or a reserve. Finally he'll disclaim thesignificance of the entire whoopee over college sports, leaving allinvolved to wonder why they are wasting their time. The result is agreat rhetorical Sunday drive, in which the turn signal for eachdetour is the phrase ''but of course.'' Ah, we like to call what wedo here at North Carolina a philosophy, not a system, but of course asecond cousin of my old college coach, Doc Allen, used a lot of theelements of that particular scheme once in a tournament game atTonganoxie Teacher's College, but of course it never would haveworked for us tonight if Scott Cherry hadn't done such a fine job offthe bench, but of course we're pleased with the victory even if weall know there are still people starving in Somalia.There is no such meandering in the Smith record. It is oneseamless declamation of excellence. Since Miller's arrival, the TarHeels have finished in third place or higher in the Atlantic CoastConference at the end of every regular season. Since that 1982championship Smith's teams have never failed to go at least as far asthe Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament. Smith has now taken teams toFinal Fours in four different decades. Yet even as the victories pileup -- he has 774 now, which means that Adolph Rupp's alltime recordof 875 will fall well before the millennium -- people still ask: Whyonly two NCAA titles?The answer may lie in the fact that Smith has never really placedwinning it all above all. How many times could he have brought insome junior college studhorse to fill a gap in his lineup? How manytimes could he have succumbed to the urge to leave a Montross on thefloor and a Salvadori on the bench just a little longer, just thisonce, to win just this game? There might have been short-term profitin doing these things, but over the long term Smith and his players,with only each other to answer to, would have felt some diminishingof their trust in one another.''The game is for the players, not the coaches,'' the coach likesto say. Of course basketball can be coached. But Dean Smith's greatachievement is recognizing that ultimately the game must be coachedfor the team, just as it must be played as a team -- and the playerscompose the team. So the contrarian's ultimate contradiction may bethat while seeming to refute Naismith, he really doesn't.Suddenly down 10 points during the first half of the 1993championship game, - with the Tar Heels in danger of taking the fullforce of a Michigan blowout, Derrick Phelps cast a quick look over atthe sideline. Would the master's hands come together, in the gestureChris Webber would be so unfortunate to make later that evening?They didn't. Instead of calling time, Dean Smith wiggled thefingers of one hand over the palm of the other in a sort ofsorcerer's pantomime, urging his players up, up the floor. Play, hishands said. Play this game that in the end can only be played.